It’s the most suburban of neighborhoods, a place of happy families and dogs and swim team cheeriness. It’s tidy and cultivated.
Except every spring when the Bradford pears bloom. Then it’s magical. The natural world has taken over and I hardly notice the vans with sports stickers.
The white trees, the way they bend over the road. Their lacy branches and dark trunks. The ethereal effect of it all.
Spring reminds us of what is invisible the rest of the year.
What happens when you jump from winter to summer overnight? When you move from a few brave daffodils and halfhearted forsythia to flowering cherries and Bradford pears; to hyacinth, forget-me-not, periwinkle and violets — and, most especially, to budding maples and poplars and oaks.
What happens is perhaps summed up in one word, actually one sound. Awwwwwww choo!
Once or twice in this blog I’ve written about our late, great parakeet, Hermes. He was a talkative little guy who had a dozen or so words in his repertoire. But the sound he made most often was the human sneeze. He heard it enough that he figured it was our call.
There’s a reason for that.
I used to wait for the perfect photograph, hold my camera steady until a split-second unobstructed view. But on today’s early morning stroll around the Tidal Basin, I didn’t mind including people in the picture. It was the people I noticed most.
The joy on their faces, not a sour look in the bunch. These are cherry blossom devotees, early risers, up before 6 to be downtown before 7. Joggers, bikers, picnickers, photographers — all here for one reason, to get their fill of beauty.
Here’s what they saw:
Spring rode in on the tail of the southwest wind. And it rode in at full speed.
Whitecaps danced on the Potomac, and greening willows swayed in the breeze.
Cyclists on the Four Mile Run Trail (one of whom was me) felt like they were on stationary bikes, so strong were the headwinds they faced. They pedaled hard but barely moved forward. A strange and unnerving sensation. Exhausting, too.
The Four Mile Trail winds through Gravelley Point Park, which lies along the approach to National Airport. Which means that when I looked up from my torturous ride, I saw this.
If I was having so much trouble steering my bike, though, how difficult was it for the pilots to land? Hmmm. Maybe not such a good day to be at Gravelly Point Park. And so I pedaled away as quickly as I could. Which wasn’t very quickly.
The rain that was supposed to come today arrived last night instead. We have sunshine and fuller air and only a faint breeze stirring the holly.
Winter has hung on longer than usual this year, and any warmth is welcome. I remind myself what it will feel like in August, the blanket of humidity that will descend upon us then, how even a half-mile stroll will be a walk through wet cement.
Doesn’t matter. I crave warmth anyway. At this point I’m an animal emerging from hibernation, shaking my coat, searching for a rock to bask upon.
I discovered them last year and have imagined them many times since. Not exactly Wordsworth’s daffodils, but close. They have the same careless profusion, the same grace and glee. They come to a world stripped of color; they are the opening salvo of spring.
Even knowing they were there, I was still surprised by their number and color, by the way they’ve threaded themselves through the woods.
And I wasn’t the only one. There were other walkers on the path, nodding, pointing, savoring their glory.
I almost took another picture. But I’d taken several last year. So this year’s pilgrimage was just to look, to imagine, to store them up like sunshine and good times. To keep them in mind as the poet did, for a “vacant” or “pensive mood.”
And that’s where they are now, and where they’ll stay.
The witch hazel has been poised like this for weeks. Half in autumn, half in spring. Some of the branches blooming, others not.
A true gardener might look at the tree and say, uh oh, it was nipped by frost — or it’s developed [add scary tree disease here] — or the big storm last June was hard on it, and that explains this holding back, this pause.
But I look at the witch hazel and see human nature. How easy it is to embrace the new, how difficult to forget the old.
I look at it and see indecision.
I know where to find them, walked right to them on Friday, crossed Soapstone, turned left onto a springy woods trail and there they were. Early, of course. But then everything is early this year.
Tall, nodding flowers, pink as buds and becoming a heavenly blue in maturity. A blue edging toward periwinkle. A color seen less often this time of year, so dominated are we by yellows, pinks and purples.
The Virginia bluebell thrives in woodland soil, rich, loamy, leaf-strewn. There are few of these wildflowers in our woods. Which makes seeing them each spring all the more essential. I make my way to their home as if visiting a national monument or a famous painting. It’s one of my rites of spring.
Photo: Bellewood Gardens.com
The ground is saturated. Rain water trickles through the soil and into drainage ditches that divide the meadow. Yesterday I spotted a young boy squatting down beside one of those ditches. His bike laid carelessly on its side, as if he couldn’t wait to plunge into the water, to see what he might find there.
I remembered the park a street behind us when I was this boy’s age. There was a creek that wound around the park, and the playground smelled of fresh mud. I imagine the creek flooded in the spring of the year. But I wouldn’t have noticed that at the time.
All I knew then was the smell of the run in the dank days of spring, standing on the bank, immersed as this boy was immersed, catching crawdads or, later, bottling creek water to look at under my microscope. Every day had the same catch in its breath as these days do.
In the first stirrings of spring, reminders of autumn. Not only from the chill air we’ve had these last few days (and Sunday’s dusting of snow), but also from the auburn halo of our budding trees, which shimmer like fall when viewed from a distance. I’m not sure of this, but I strongly suspect the buds are making my eyes water, too.
But all is forgiven because it is spring. And the red buds that stand out against the blue sky, that scatter themselves across the greening grass, they are just part of the bounty and the beauty of the season. A season that tips its hat to the work of nature that made it possible.